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Take Control of PDFpen 6

Learn to create, edit, and manipulate PDFs with Smile’s PDFpen 6!

Have you ever needed to give feedback on a PDF, but stumbled around trying to insert comments and proofreading marks? Or spent way too long trying to refresh the date on a PDF-based flyer? Maybe you wanted to fill out and sign a PDF-based form without printing it and faxing it back? What about making your own PDF-based form with fill-in fields that could be submitted over the Internet? Or have you wished you could OCR scanned text so you could revise it right in the PDF? All these tasks—and much more—can be done with PDFpen from Smile.

Even better, there’s an in-depth guide for all these tasks. Written by Michael E. Cohen with clarity and humor, Take Control of PDFpen 6 turns you into a PDF productivity powerhouse while you work at your Mac with PDFpen or PDFpenPro, or on the go with your iPad or iPhone.

Save 20% Members of Take Control’s sister publication, TidBITS, can save 20% on all Smile products purchased through the Smile cart. To learn more, visit the Membership Benefits page. To access the coupon code, make sure you’ve logged in and click through from the Your Member Benefits page.

Michael begins with a rundown of your purchasing options: PDFpen versus PDFpenPro, from Smile versus the Mac App Store, and the advantages of an iPhone or iPad version.

This ebook was created in collaboration with Smile, with PDFpen’s developers tech editing the manuscript.

Next, you’ll meet PDFpen, starting with a general overview of the PDF format, followed by a tour of PDFpen’s user interface—including the new Editing bar. Then Michael jumps into the many ways you can modify a PDF:

Add and remove pages, and combine pages from multiple files into one PDF.

Changes in the Apple environment:

The latest versions of Mac OS X change how you can Save or Export Your PDFs.

The advent of the Mac App Store changes how you might buy PDFpen as well as what it can do; see Get Your Hands on PDFpen for an overview.

The introduction of Apple’s iCloud service brings new ways to share PDFs among devices, which I explain in Head in the iCloud.

The availability of PDFpen for iPhone and for iPad means there are new platforms on which you can edit PDFs; see Use PDFpen on iOS to learn mobile editing techniques and find the tools you need, and for advice on how to Get PDFs in and out of PDFpen on iOS.

FAQ

What version of PDFpen/PDFpenPro on the Mac does this book cover?

The descriptions of the Mac versions of PDFpen/PDFpenPro in this book are based upon version 6.0.2. Because prior versions of PDFpen/PDFpenPro 6 had some differences from version 6.0.2, you should update to (at least) version 6.0.2 in order to best benefit from this book.

Does this book talk about PDFpen/PDFpenPro 5?

With respect to the Mac version of PDFpen/PDFpenPro, this book focuses on PDFpen 6. In areas where PDFpen 6 is a lot like PDFpen 5, the book does describe PDFpen 5, sort of. But, if you want help with PDFpen 5, you should read Take Control of PDFpen 5. PDFpen 5 and PDFpenPro 5 work with Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, 10.7 Lion, and 10.8 Mountain Lion.

One of the best parts of finishing a book is talking it up in an interview on MacVoices with Chuck Joiner. In this chat we talk about new features in PDFpen, the various ways you can buy it and how that affects PDFpen’s feature set, and why Smile chose to make PDFpen 7 and PDFpenPro 7 require OS X 10.10 Yosemite.

Smile has just announced the release of PDFpen 6.3.2 and PDFpenPro 6.3.2, which contain updates that make the apps ready for OS X 10.10 Yosemite when it is released later this fall. The updates (free to registered users) are available from Smile’s site for those who purchased the software directly; the versions sold via the Mac App Store are currently being reviewed and should be released shortly. The detailed release notes are here.

Smile has released versions 6.3 of PDFpen and PDFpenPro, adding Text-to-Speech support, so that you can now select text in a PDF and choose Edit > Speech > Start Speaking to have your Mac read it aloud. The new release also improves PDFpen’s support for VoiceOver and Accessibility, and a host of other improvements. Read the release notes for more. The update is free to all registered purchasers of PDFpen 6.

Smile has released new versions of PDFpen for iPad and PDFpen for iPhone. Version 1.7 of both apps, available as free upgrades from the App Store, now require iOS 7. The new versions feature enhanced performance, a new page indicator when paging, and the ability to tie Dropbox sync folders to multiple accounts. If you haven’t updated to iOS 7, you can still obtain PDFpen for iPad 1.6.2 and PDFpen for iPhone 1.4.2.

PDFpen and PDFpenPro have been updated to version 6.1.3. In addition to bug fixes, this version provides toolbar buttons for Redaction. You can install the buttons by choosing View > Customize Toolbar. The update also provides support for making phone numbers into clickable links. You can find the release notes on Smile’s Help site. To get the update, choose  > Software Update if you purchased PDFpen or PDFpenPro via the Mac App Store; if you purchased your copy from Smile, choose PDFpen (or PDFpenPro) > Check for Updates.

Smile has released a new iOS app, PDFpen Scan+, that can make PDFs right on your iOS device, using either your iOS device’s camera or images stored in its Photos library. The scanning app features automatic edge detection, image brightness and contrast controls, and OCR (Optical Character Recognition) in 16 languages. The app provides easy sharing of PDFs with PDFpen for iPhone and PDFpen for iPad so you can quickly mark up and annotate your new PDF. See the TidBITS review for more about this app.

In the sidebar “Scan setting side-effects” (pg. 51 in the PDF), the following note appears:

Because of Apple’s sandboxing rules, changing the destination of your scans from the Pictures folder with the Scan To pop-up menu is only temporary—the next time you launch PDFpen, the destination is set back to the Pictures folder.

In version 6.0.4, PDFpen and PDFpenPro no longer present a Scan To pop-up menu. In fact, PDFpen and PDFpenPro no longer save scans to a separate location when they add scans to a PDF with the Import from Scanner command. Instead, scans are only added to the active PDF; when the PDF is saved, the scan is included. This change was made because Apple’s Image Capture framework, used for scanning, has a bug that allows you to choose locations where you cannot, in fact, save a scan. Smile has eliminated the Scan To option because of this bug.

All singing, all dancing, a cavalcade of wit and charm! Or maybe just an interesting interview with Chuck Joiner and Michael E. Cohen about PDFs and Take Control of PDFpen 6. Watch or listen on MacVoices.

Michael E. Cohen has taught English composition, worked as a programmer for NASA’s Deep Space Network, helped develop the first commercial ebooks at the Voyager Company, and co-founded a major university’s Humanities computing center. He has authored several books, including Take Control of PDFpen 9,Take Control of Pages,Take Control of iBooks Author, and Take Control of TextExpander.

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